"Just Tell Me Who It Was:" Wives and What Could Be

By John Dyer

The Shady Hill depicted in "Just Tell Me Who It Was" is such a nice place, so sweet a place, that it's cloying. Characters in the tale are so excessively affectionate, they are always on the brink of smothering each other and blinding themselves with love. The story is about their reactions to those moments when their excessive affection threatens to overturn the precariously pleasant life they have built up around themselves.

The points of concern in the story are the initial descriptions of Will Pym, the few scenes after the country club party, and the moment when Will lashes out at Henry Bulstrode on the train platform.

He was a cheerful, heavy man with a round face that looked exactly like a pudding. Everyone was glad to see him, as one is glad to see, at the end of a meal, the appearance of a bland, fragrant, and nourishing dish made of fresh eggs, nutmeg, and country cream. (138)

However, the reader should question the nature of Will's perfect world. As the above passage implies, there is something excessive about Will. He is undoubtedly healthy, but perhaps too much so. His face doesn't just resemble a pudding, it looks "exactly" like a pudding; his appearance, equated with a large dessert, which comes at the end of a meal, is described in terms of excess, for a dessert tops off any food already consumed. Will is "heavy."

These questions are addressed more fully when Cheever begins describing Will's adoration for his wife. Will's heaviness translates into oppression in the realm of marriage:

At dinners, he would look across the table at her in the candlelight--laughing, talking deeply, and flashing the rings he had bought her--and sigh deeply. He was always impatient for the party to end, so that they would be alone again, in a taxi or in an empty street where he could kiss her. When Maria first got pregnant, he couldn't describe his happiness. Every development in her condition astonished him. He was captivated by the preparations she made for the baby. When their first child was born, when milk flowed from her breasts, when their daughter excited in her the most natural tenderness, he was amazed. (139)

Will stopped and took a knife from his pocket and began to cut their initials in the bark of a tree. What sense would there be pointing out that his hair was thin? He meant to express love. It was Maria's youth and beauty that had informed his senses and left his mind so open that the earth seemed spread out before his eyes like a broad map of reason and sensuality...But Maria was cold and tired and hungry...When they got home, she would have to fix the supper. (141-2)

The couple's differences come to a head in the few days surrounding the annual Apple Blossom Fete, a costume ball. A week before the ball, Maria is tying paper apple blossoms to branches as part of her duties as a member of the decorations committee. Will is sitting in his bathrobe, the children are upstairs sleeping, and all seems right in the world. Then Maria models her costume for Will:

She was wearing gold slippers, pink tights, and a light velvet bodice, cut low enough to see the division of her breasts...A terrible sadness came over Will. The tight costume--he had to polish his eyeglasses to see it better--displayed all the beauty he worshipped, and it also expressed her perfect innocence of the wickedness of the world. (143)

Will protests that Maria cannot wear such a flattering and revealing outfit, but she pleads and begs he allow her to. Will cannot resist her entreaties:

"You're lovely and innocent," he said. "You don't know what a bunch of dogs men are."

The trees of Shady Hill were filled with birds--larks, thrushes, robins, crows--and now the air began to ring with their song. The pristine light and the loud singing reminded her of some ideal--some simple way of life, in which she dried her hands on an apron and Will came home from the sea--that she had betrayed.

He went upstairs to their room, which was dark. He turned on a light in her closet and opened the chest where she kept her shoes. There were a great many pairs, and among them were gold shoes, silver shoes, bronze shoes, and he was shuffling through the collection when he saw Maria standing in the doorway. "Oh, my God, Mummy, forgive me!" he said. "Forgive me!"

And then Henry Bulstrode stepped out of the waiting room, showed his white teeth with a smile, and frowned at his newspaper. Without any warning at all, Will walked over to him and knocked him down. Women screamed, and the scuffle that followed was very confusing.

After this brief moment, Will is back to normal. Suddenly he is the master of his world again:

Now his fruitful life with Maria would be resumed. They would walk on Sunday afternoons again, and play word games by the open fire again, and weed the roses again, and love one another under the sounds of the rain again, and hear singing of the crows; and he would buy her a present that afternoon as a signal of love and forgiveness. He would buy her pearls or gold or sapphires--something expensive; emeralds maybe; something no young man could afford. 162